Enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult to stay abreast with the rapidly evolving technology platforms. That is, software and hardware upgrades are commonplace for an information technology (IT) infrastructure of an enterprise and maintaining a state of the art infrastructure is costly, time consuming, and distracts from the business of an enterprise. But, there is no avoiding technology and the enterprise's business is intimately dependent on its underlying infrastructure. So, an enterprise is in a catch-22 position and is forced to maintain a costly IT infrastructure.
To remedy these concerns a new technology has been gaining acceptance in the industry. This technology is referred to as “cloud computing.” The term “cloud” is used as a metaphor for how the Internet is depicted in diagrams and is used as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure, which is being concealed with cloud computing. Cloud computing is often defined as computing capabilities that provide an abstraction between computing resources and the underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
With cloud computing and cloud storage, enterprises are recognizing an economy of scale in migrating portions of their data centers to various cloud providers. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is currently the most common mechanism for providing cloud computing and storage. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are focused more on providing specific services or specific platform services rather than raw infrastructure.
One of the concerns that the cloud services provider are likely to face as cloud services and cloud infrastructure become more important to enterprise users is the issue of service-level agreements (SLA's). Anyone paying for a service has an expectation that the service will be operated so as to meet their needs. These needs not only include security and stability but also include responsiveness and accessibility. Typically, responsiveness is directly related to the location of the end user and the cloud services that the end-user will be utilizing.
While geography plays a part in this, more important is the state of a network in relation to the user and the cloud services. So, because of the way the network is set up, processes may be more advantageously located (for responsiveness) in locations that are not geographically close. Furthermore, because of the nature of the Internet and the anticipated cloud service providers operating on the Internet, it is important to not only acquire the state of the network in relation to geography but also to maintain that state so that it is constantly up to date. This type of maintenance of the network state will become more important as more and more cloud services providers instantiate clouds in different geographic locations so as to provide more responsive services to their customers, disaster recovery, etc.